I taught college courses for 16 years, and sometimes made liberal use of electronic tools like Blackboard. I occasionally had the pleasure of online tutorials in the context of my day job in computers. I thought I had a pretty good feel for what technology could and couldn't do as a substitute for the classroom.
I thought it could provide an integrated bunch of tools for linguistic interaction, and visual observation, without the important social interaction that makes education what it has been since at least Plato and Aristotle. I still think it can, but it has a long way to go. I also think I underestimated the importance of what it doesn't and will never do.
Of course, you can present videos; we knew that. There are a zillion of them on YouTube, on everything from how to cut a dado joint to how to play a scale on a sousaphone. I saw one yesterday on how to clean N95 masks for re-use. No idea of the person's credentials, but he spent about 15 minutes explaining that you could soak them in alcohol or diluted bleach and dry them quickly. Which is to say, you can do a 15 minute educational video whose basic content is the equivalent of a 12-word sentence that most people could have figured out by themselves. That doesn't mean there aren't some that are much more useful. I don't actually know how to play the sousaphone, so if I happened to find myself in possession of one a video might be just the thing.
Schools are closed in NYC until at least the end of April, and the way the epidemic is going I'm not sure I believe kids are going back to the classroom by the end of April, as the Mayor and the Department of Education aver. Google Classroom is the virtual substitute, and I have to hand it to the DOE, the staff and the teachers: they have made a Herculean effort to do something better than give the kids an extended spring vacation. They had to identify software, train the teachers to use it, provide the technical means to access it for those who did not have it (or have enough of it - what do you do when there are several school age children in the house?), create accounts for all the teachers and children for each of the online tools they would need, come up with a curriculum and schedule, write dozens of emails to keep parents informed, and a lot more.
It might not be totally unfair to point out that DOE could have been better prepared for a situation like this. They might have created an online learning environment that could be more seamlessly switched on in the event of school closings. But they were hardly the only ones caught unawares by this situation; the entire society has been caught napping about a threat that has happened before, even though we have been warned that it could happen again. Of course, this is hardly the only reason schools might be closed; natural and manmade disasters come in many forms. But we have spent billions protecting ourselves against terrorism, which never has claimed, or possibly could, the number of lives a serious pandemic can, while cutting funding for health care and education. So why should DOE be better prepared than the rest of our society?
It is heroic that they got this together, and certainly not a wasted effort. As parents, we appreciate almost any amount of structure that we don't have to provide ourselves. That is mainly because children have a natural instinct to treat structures created by non-parents as far more critical to their well-being than those created by parents. I don't know how Leopold Mozart managed with little Wolfgang, but trying to give my daughter piano lessons was a losing proposition; we finally signed her up with a piano teacher. I suspect the only sustainable home schooling method is terror, which I am not personally capable of, except occasionally.
In other words, I am happy for the school to provide a structure. But it was a hundred times easier, and took a lot less of my time, to tell my daughter "Do these five pages from your math book" and things like that a few times a day, check the work, and call it "home schooling", before "Remote Learning" began.
Google "classroom" is not really even an online classroom, much less a substitute for a real one. It is a space to create accounts for different teachers and allow them to post assignments. This is by design: according to Google, "Classroom helps students and teachers organize assignments, boost collaboration, and foster better communication." That's not even a virtual "classroom" but a visual organizer for links. Aside from that, it is not even remotely, or virtually, or in any sense at all, an environment that young kids can interact with on their own.
It is not just that even on a good sized laptop, many if not most of the text, both native and embedded in other links, is so small that students don't even bother to read it. Nor that to be useful, every assignment contains a variety of links, icons, buttons, images and video links that students just will not read thoroughly. That is enough to derail this as a learning environment for young kids, but the difficulties go well beyond that.
To take one example: videos can be run from Google Classroom, technically; but they are not, in our case, because that requires students accessing the teacher's Google Drive account, which according to the teacher posed security and communication issues. So they have to be run from YouTube, which requires the following sequence of actions, putatively by the student:
- Click on the video
- You then get an error message, "Video unavailable", and a link, "Do you want to run this in YouTube?", which opens YouTube in a new tab.
- Click on the full screen icon or run the video.
- Click on the small screen icon when it's done if you enlarged it.
- Close the new YoutTube tab.
- On the Google screen, click outside the error message box to close the box and display the assignment screen again.
- Navigate back to the page from which the assignment was posted.
I created Toolbar links for the five or six web sites the children are told to utilize; still, navigating to them while keeping the Google Classroom page visible requires opening a new browser tab, something even I forget to do, and entering passwords, all different - none of them have a "make password visible" option, so plenty of opportunity for children to make errors and get frustrated before they even get access to the site. Then they have to follow the specific navigation for each site in order to get to the assignment.
Marking assignments as completed looks as easy as clicking a button in Google Classroom. But half the time we clicked the button the assignments were still marked as not completed. Is it a Google bug? It seems rather to be a design issue, which is resolved by learning even more navigation tricks.
My daughter reports to me that she is "done" with an assignment. It is five minutes since she started it. I have to go through the entire 30 page Powerpoint presentation myself, and I notice that it specifies activities she is supposed to do around the house, which she has overlooked. I might say "conveniently" overlooked, but I am not sure about that; these endlessly varied text-based online instructions are just not the kind of thing children have the attention-span for.
Google Classroom presents several tabs and views, and assignments are visible in more than one of them; but some contain a confusing sequence of assignments interlaced with student and teacher comments, and others have just assignments, but they either have every assignment that has been posted, or just the ones that are upcoming. To get to a particular view requires clicking one of several types of tabs or links.
When I used to manage computer applications, the programmers working on the project would sometimes come up with ingenious ideas for features that could give the users more options or flexibility. Often I had to reluctantly ask them not to do it, or even to remove them. (Getting programmers to do just what the specification say can be a little like trying to keep marbles on a glass coffee table - though in all fairness, there are times when the motto "be careful what you ask for, you might get it" applies especially well to system designs.) More options and features offer more ways for users to get confused, and to produce results that they do not understand. You have to judge the level of the typical user before you add features. The level of my six-year-old is amazing; for example, without any help, she can locate and play YouTube videos that seem specifically intended to drive parents nuts. But even I have trouble navigating the features of Google Classroom.
Let's say my daughter doesn't understand how to complete an assignment, and I can't explain how to do it myself. She can communicate with the teacher by typing into a message box. She might well explain her difficulty in passable typed English by the time the schedule says to be doing something else. I had better email the teacher instead.
Yesterday she was supposed to do a search for "blends and digraphs". Those are not terms I learned when I went to school ("diphthong" yes, "digraph" no, "blend" I just looked up - "brunch" is a blend, get it?) Presumably the terms were explained in a video, if not before the schools were closed. But here's where you begin to appreciate what cannot be done in a video: the student raising a hand to ask a question, or the teacher seeing the puzzled look on children's faces and trying again, or walking around the room to see how kids are doing, or adding reminders of key points at an appropriate time. For young children, the option of typing a question in a box is a klunky substitute if it is a substitute at all.
A completely interactive online classroom would help to some extent. It is not practical unless DOE can guarantee that each student in each family has not only the device to access the instruction at the time the teachers are online, but the space not to interfere with each other, so that three schoolchildren in a household not only have their own devices but either their own rooms, or their own headphones with built-in microphones. This is a tall order, and it would not solve most of the problems. My daughter says again and again, "I'm done". But the teacher is not there to check that, and only a few of the assignments are online or uploaded. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I can generally check my daughter's 1st grade work. (I can even look up "diagraph" if I have to.) But I don't know if all the Spanish-speaking or Mandarin-speaking households of my daughter's classmates have someone who can. And it is not how school is supposed to work: one teacher is supposed to guide a group of children to roughly the same level of learning, or to at least a common denominator, not 30 parents in isolation with their kids.
Not to mention that if my daughter fails to read some of the small print, or thinks she has completed an attendance form but forgets to submit it , or fails to go back to complete one of the multiple forms posted for a single assignment, she will be marked as having failed to complete her work. The fact is that virtually every assignment so far has required parental intervention of one sort or another. This is classroom for student-parent units, not for students. But many parents are supposed to be working from home at this time. How is that supposed to be practical?
This is to say nothing of the fact that an online environment can't possibly replace organized physical activities like songs and dances and gym and performances and the like. Or the enforced addition to screen time for children who strongly gravitate to online entertainment when they are not doing structured educational activities.
The best part of the day is a 30-minute video conference the teacher runs during what is supposed to be lunch hour. The kids seem to love it. Not much teaching goes on, but it's like one big Facetime playdate. Only, consider the risks: the computer's camera is on, looking into all the students' homes. It may be that not every household member is informed of the session, and people breeze by in whatever they happen to be wearing as they "shelter in place". It may be that adults don't realize they are in earshot and say inappropriate things. It may be, as happened yesterday, that a student forgets to hang up the call, and the computer is sitting there in webcam mode as life in the household goes on, oblivious to being propagated into other households. Illegal activities piped onto children's video screens courtesy of a DOE-sponsored video chat? I'm waiting to see how long this lasts before the liabilities begin to pile up.
"Remote Learning", "Online Education", "Virtual Classroom" - these are promising phrases whose content, I think, is not completely vacuous only because they occur in the context of a society where real learning environments are the norm. They are better than nothing for filling in cracks and crevices and providing short term alternatives which, for young children at least, require enormous amounts of parental support.
Hurray for DOE for coming together with something to provide a semblance of a virtual learning environment on short notice. And hurray for Aristotle's Lyceum, where classes on scientific and philosophical topics were held in the context of a devotion to physical and social development of the individual. I visited what remains of the Lyceum (not much) on a trip to Greece just a few months ago, and was overcome with emotion at the thought: I am standing by a bit of soil and a few old stones where Aristotle once stood, presenting to his students the views that would guide Western science and education for nearly 2000 years.
As we weather the current crisis, we may come out of it appreciating more than ever the value of that DOE real estate, those bricks and mortar, and not overestimate what can be done without them. And that might even help us with the resolve to improve our readiness for virulent bugs so that it doesn't have to come to virtual learning again.
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